How does one redirect from one wordpress page to another via htaccess?

Question

I tried making the following change to my wordpress site to permanently redirect a common link to a new page. I could've -sworn- that this used to work. But it simply does not (at least in WP 3.9). I have had to resort to using a Redirect Plug-In.

I'm wondering -why- it doesn't work and if there is a technique which -will- work. I'd prefer to continue to use .htaccess for simplicity.

Below is the .htaccess file:

 # MY CHANGES
 Redirect 301 http://mysite.com/gigs  http://mysite.com/booking/

 # BEGIN WordPress
 <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
 RewriteEngine On
 RewriteBase /
 RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
 RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
 </IfModule>

Again, it works by using a redirect plug-in inside WP, but there must be a way to force the 'redirection' to occur -before- the URL is passed to the WP engine, right? How is the done?

Answer 1

Your syntax for Redirect is wrong.

• The first URL should be relative
• The second URL should be abolute

Try this instead:

Redirect 301 /gigs  http://example.com/booking/

Answer 2

To use Redirect you need mod_alias enabled in your apache configuration. If it is not working, it is likely that this module is not enabled.

As you are using mod_rewrite module for redirects already and it is enabled, you should really use RewriteRule:

RewriteRule ^/gigs$ http://example.com/booking/ [R=301,L,NE]